Ms. Houston was different.

Mr. Davis signed her in 1983 when she was just 19 years old, and he played an essential role on all but one album she recorded over the next 29 years.

He brought her songs and scouted producers. He introduced her at publicity events. He repeatedly extolled her supremacy over Mariah Carey.

At the peak of her life, she secured his place as an industry titan. In death, she haunts his legacy.

This past April, a laudatory documentary about him, “Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives” (based on his own memoir and available next week on Apple Music), opened the Tribeca Festival. A great party was given at Radio City Music Hall. Jennifer Hudson sauntered through the crowd singing a medley of Ms. Houston’s greatest hits.

Then came mixed reviews — and the debut at the festival of “Whitney: Can I Be Me,” a contrasting documentary that casts Ms. Houston as a victim of the music business’s most base inclinations. (It is currently airing on Showtime.)

Much like last year’s Academy Award-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” it raises difficult questions about race and arrives at the conclusion that there was a psychological cost to being a black superstar whose image was created with the express purpose of maximum crossover.

Kenneth Reynolds, who worked at Arista, the label founded by Mr. Davis and on which Ms. Houston made her career, recounts how material that “was too black-sounding was sent back.” Kirk Whalum, who played saxophone on several of Ms. Houston’s tours, describes a woman who became devastated to learn that black people were calling her “White-ney” and a “sellout.”

Mr. Davis isn’t the principal villain in this other film.

There is much blame directed at Ms. Houston’s mother, the gospel singer Cissy Houston, and various members of the Houston clan, who had been on her payroll for many years.

But, still.

Another powerful component of this documentary is the on-camera testimony of more than a half-dozen colleagues of Ms. Houston’s, who say that the singer’s spiral into addiction had as much to do with her sexuality as it did with race.

Ms. Houston’s relationship with Robyn Crawford, an essential person in her camp from before Ms. Houston became famous until 1999, was the subject of speculation and gossip. Now, the narrative that the two were lovers had gained real currency, even without confirmation from Ms. Crawford.

Mr. Reynolds, who toured the country with Ms. Houston during the promotion of her debut album, described her lesbianism as “an open secret” at Arista during those early years.

“Every Little Step,” a recent book by Ms. Houston’s ex-husband, the R&B singer Bobby Brown, also takes the position that Ms. Houston’s sexuality was part of her struggle. Her marriage to him, he suggests, gave her the ability to reclaim her blackness while holding on to a basic image of straightness.

“They couldn’t let Whitney live the life she wanted to live; they insisted that she be perfect, that she be someone she wasn’t,” Mr. Brown writes. “That’s why they wanted Robyn out.”

Some people were circumspect about who “they” was. Mr. Brown wasn’t. He named them: “Clive Davis and her family.”

How Will I Know

“An artist can be extremely gifted and yet remain unsuccessful if he or she records the wrong music, or gets an image that confuses potential audiences.” That’s from “Clive: Inside the Music Business,” Mr. Davis’s 1974 memoir about his time at CBS Records.

Being out as lesbian or bisexual certainly would have confused audiences in 1985, said the actress and comedian Rosie O’Donnell, who knew Ms. Houston and Ms. Crawford socially and said she had “no doubt” they were together and that what they had “was real.” (Ms. Crawford declined to speak for this article, and did not submit to an interview for “Whitney: Can I Be Me”).

Back then, Ms. O’Donnell said, “There was no Ellen. There was no ‘Will & Grace.’ Lois Smith was my publicist, and she was Whitney’s publicist. When I would go to a show or the Emmys with my girlfriend Kelly, Lois would literally sit between us. She wasn’t doing it to be mean to Kelly. She was trying to protect me.”

Among the first of Ms. Houston’s contemporaries to come out was the country singer K.D. Lang, who declared she was a lesbian in 1992. A few months later, Melissa Etheridge followed suit.

But it was another half a decade until Ellen DeGeneres and Ms. O’Donnell broke the news, and they waited until shortly before their television shows went off the air to do so.

That was how it happened back then with the biggest stars, if it happened at all. You did it when you had enough money to walk away from the machine, or you used a decline to propel yourself into a life of paid appearances at gay pride parades.

“Whitney was the first evidence I had that people were willing to acquiesce to whatever it was in order to hold on to an image that wouldn’t offend, because at the time, it meant you wouldn’t have a career in show business,” Ms. O’Donnell said. “None.”

The decision to come out was also hard for those in the music business who worked behind the scenes.

David Geffen, the veteran record label owner and manager, announced he was gay at an AIDS benefit in 1992. His friend Sandy Gallin, who managed Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson, followed in 1994, around the time the Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner left his wife for a man.

Yet it wasn’t until 2013 that Mr. Davis acknowledged what many had known for a while: that after two marriages and four children, he had a male partner.

The New York Times reviewer who panned his second memoir wrote: “Though we do hear about his failed first marriage, his second and its aftermath go M.I.A. for several hundred pages before he awkwardly cops to being ‘bisexual’ and in ‘a strong monogamous relationship for the last seven years’ with another man.”

Step by Step

Mr. Davis’s life is a story, and he’s a dazzling character in it. It’s his tinted glasses, snazzy suits and apparent fondness for telling tales again and again — life as a rolling press junket. That some of those stories do not track, are dated and appear false on their face matters little. He probably didn’t wind up as a co-writer of Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” by being principally concerned with the opinions of skeptics.

Most of Mr. Davis’s contemporaries who became label heads started as music men. Mr. Davis is a former lawyer and his corporate sensibilities poked through the material he released, particularly at Arista.

When Aretha Franklin traded in the analog soul sound and distinctly political edge of her work at Atlantic for the consumerist, synthetic pop of Arista in 1979, The Washington Post described her first album there by saying “The queen of soul seems to be striving for a new role — the queen of sap.” The effect was sad, but few could deny Mr. Davis had an ear.

Carly Simon also had a comeback with Arista. She adores Mr. Davis, who had some great advice for her over the years. But she also said, “His energy, his testosterone, all his hormones were ignited by having the biggest No. 1 records.” She added: “He is on the side of the winner at all costs, and the cost can be very high. The cost can be somebody’s career or somebody’s innateness.”

Mr. Davis grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where he was a member of the high school honors society, which was called Arista. While he was in college at New York University, his parents died in close succession. It was devastating, but the loss turned out to be propulsive.

“Life can change on a dime,” he said.

After Harvard Law School, he worked at a law firm, then joined CBS Records (later Columbia) in 1960 as one of two in-house lawyers. At the time, its main business was classical music, Broadway cast albums and middle-of-the-road pop singers. But profits were dropping. Mr. Davis understood that the future was in rock ’n’ roll. Within seven years, at 35, he was running the label.

At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, he heard Janis Joplin and described it as almost like finding religion. Yet when she came to Columbia’s offices and suggested that they seal the deal with a trip to bed, Mr. Davis demurred.

In 1968 she finished her first album, and Mr. Davis thought that its single “Piece of My Heart” was too long and didn’t repeat the chorus enough. He went into the studio and re-edited it for radio on his own. He played his version for Ms. Joplin and gently coaxed her into allowing the label to release it.

It went gold, the album sold more than a million copies, and the myth of the Great and Powerful Clive, a man with no musical training and supreme ears, was underway.

He was “devastated” when Joplin died in 1970. “Our fortunes were intertwined,” he writes in his first memoir. It was a “terrible loss.”

But it went beyond the personal. “It would be wrong to pretend I wasn’t upset over the commercial loss as well,” he adds in the memoir. “The music business is a business.”

Over the next few years, CBS (now called Columbia) signed Santana; Earth, Wind & Fire; Blood, Sweat & Tears; and Liza Minnelli. Mr. Davis entered into a promotion and distribution deal with Philadelphia International, which moved the company into R&B and disco, with great success.

Then, a reckoning followed when a Newark federal grand jury investigation was convened to look into the practice of industry payola. The Internal Revenue Service obtained financial records that showed that quarterly promotion checks sent by Columbia to Philadelphia International had been used to illegally supply money and drugs to radio programmers.

Mr. Davis also ended up in a muddle in which a mafia-acquainted head of artist relations dummied up false expense reports, included one for $18,000 for the Plaza Hotel bar mitzvah of Mr. Davis’s son Fred, billed as a party for Ms. Minnelli. Other violations included airfare for two of Mr. Davis’s pet beagles.

Mr. Davis was charged with six counts of tax evasion and pleaded guilty to one count. He maintains that he did nothing wrong, besides relying on someone who went too far on his unknowing behalf. “It was a witch hunt,” he said, and many agree.

Payola was never proven. But he was still fired.

In Fredric Dannen’s 1990 book, ‘“Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business,” Arthur Taylor — who dismissed Mr. Davis from his job — explained that the cause of the firing was that Mr. Davis had been offered the opportunity to come clean on the expense account issues and responded with lies.

“There’s something so strange about Clive Davis,” said Mr. Dannen, speaking now. “He has had one of the most remarkable careers in the music business, and yet so much about it is tainted. Not just by the payola thing, but by his need for attention. It may be that Clive’s greatest talent is his ability to distort reality.”

In My Business

Determined to rebuild his reputation, Mr. Davis took over a small label called Bell Records in 1974 and renamed it Arista. He signed Patti Smith and Lou Reed, but his principal success in the early years came from middle-of-the-road singers.

Enter: Barry Manilow and Melissa Manchester, both of whom sold loads of albums at their peak, yet subsequently seemed to lose part of their souls, as Mr. Davis relentlessly molded their images and their music to his liking.

“We could not find a comfortable way to communicate,” Ms. Manchester said. “As my albums progressed, I had to fight harder and harder to get a place for my songs, which was weird, because I’d come in thinking he liked what I did as a singer-songwriter, and he wanted me to be a vocalist for songs that I thought were rather bland and simply loud. He always wanted me to be current, and I always wanted to be timeless. It’s a different way of looking at the same picture.”

Mr. Manilow had similar issues. When he first started out, he wrote pop songs with contemplative lyrics about broken marriages. Then he met the label head who, Mr. Manilow said in a memoir, “looked more like a banker than a music man” and told him that his album was “nice” but needed hits. Mr. Davis started delivering him other people’s songs to sing.

“I Write the Songs,” despite the title, was one. Another was “Brandy,” later changed to “Mandy.” These cemented Mr. Manilow’s status as the grieving straight guy who couldn’t get over a lost love.

It was hard for Mr. Manilow to know what to think. He was a giant success, yet he was miserable. He wrote in his diary: “Why am I angry?”

In 1981, Mr. Manilow and Mr. Davis had a tense meeting. In it, Mr. Davis said, Mr. Manilow complained that he was turning into a milquetoast Andy Williams. Mr. Davis responded: “Well, if you were Irving Berlin, we would know it by now.”

So Mr. Manilow left the label, although not before someone handled the rumors of him being gay by saying that he was living with a female production assistant named Linda Allen.

Then, his first album with RCA bombed, and he returned. Mr. Manilow finally came out in 2017, many years after returning to Mr. Davis’s stable.

The sabbatical was fortuitous. “It helped him get a different perspective and cherish the partnership,” Mr. Davis said.

“There’s this eternal argument between the part of us that wants to be an artist and the part of us that wants to be a success,” Ms. Simon said. “The success part often wins.”

Same Script, Different Cast

Mr. Davis never liked being called a Svengali for what he did with Ms. Houston. He thought that sounded slithery. Still, it’s hard to describe their collaboration without leaving that impression.

They met in 1983 at the behest of Gerry Griffith, who worked in Arista’s A&R department.

Ms. Houston was born near housing projects in Newark. Her family moved to the more middle-class East Orange, N.J., when Cissy, Ms. Houston’s mother and a backup singer for Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, began enjoying success.

As a child, Whitney sang gospel with the New Hope Baptist Choir. She was unsure of herself, with a tendency to sing in the back. Cissy had some ambivalence about whether her daughter should become an entertainer, but she nevertheless told her that if she was going to sing, she’d better step up.

By 16, she was singing with Cissy on Chaka Khan’s disco masterpiece “Clouds.” Whitney may not have known then what the bargain of fame would feel like, but she knew where she was headed. “I was always going to be a star,” she later said.

So a showcase for Mr. Davis was set up.

Her performances that night were standards: “Home” from “The Wiz” and then “The Greatest Love of All.”

“They were knockouts,” Mr. Davis said. “She had the entire package.”

Ms. Houston was beautiful. She had great power as a singer. But beyond that, he said, she had a level of self-control that was remarkable.

If she did not have great ambitions to become a songwriter (a thing critics subsequently used to discount her artistry), Ms. Houston knew exactly what she was singing about. When she did runs, it was usually because the lyrics called for it.

Mr. Davis’s recollection is that he talked with Ms. Houston around that time about music, and she told him Lena Horne and Dionne Warwick (who was her cousin and already on Arista) were her favorite singers.

Later, Ms. Houston would say her favorites growing up were Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Natalie Cole, which is a big difference. Who knows which version of the story is true. Ms. Houston, like Mr. Davis, was never the world’s most reliable narrator.

Two weeks after Mr. Davis signed her, he went on “The Merv Griffin Show” and introduced his protégée to the world. She hadn’t recorded a song yet, but that was how much he believed in her. (Also: He loved going on television.)

Making her debut album took nearly two years. Mr. Davis said the idea back then was to build her appeal in both the pop and the R&B markets, but Mr. Reynolds said there was never any question which one was more important.

“Arista was a pop-oriented label,” Mr. Reynolds said. “That’s what the staff knew and that’s what Clive knew. That’s what he did best — and he did it better than most record executives. There was no platform for Aretha Franklin’s ‘Ain’t No Way’ on Arista. They needed Aretha Franklin doing ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who?’ and Whitney Houston doing ‘Greatest Love of All’ and Billy Ocean doing ‘Caribbean Queen.’ Because the bigger the pop record, the more money you could make.”

And when “Whitney Houston” came out in 1985 and turned into the biggest-selling debut album in history, the principals involved did make money.

Three songs went No. 1 on the Hot 100. She won a Grammy in the pop category for “Saving All My Love for You” but lost in the R&B category for “You Give Good Love,” a clear indication of the success of the appeal to white audiences.